OnMission 365

Why do we serve our city?

We serve as a response to the gospel. Jesus first served us by giving his life in our place, so we want to respond by leveraging our lives for Him. Jesus summarizes what that looks like in Matthew 22:36-40, telling us to love God with all of our heart, and to love our neighbor. It’s easy to wonder who exactly counts as our neighbor? Luke 10 answers this by showing us that our neighbor isn’t defined by their proximity, our neighbor is anyone we come in contact with.

The community engagement ministry at Image Church exists to send disciples who make disciples among the hurting and marginalized in our community.

We prioritize relationships over projects. Our goal is to create bridges to lasting relationships and not just attempting one-time projects. As we do that, it’s important to understand that these relationships we’re forming are mutually beneficial and not just one-sided charitable contributions.

Serving the least of these in our city means that we have to be intersecting our lives with people who look different and live different. We believe that in these relationships discipleship happens, so we want to be intentional to serve our city in a way that uniquely fosters relationships with people that we might not typically cross paths with.

As we do that, we have to be careful to not define people by their situation; instead, we need to view them based on God’s design as his image bearers. Every person, no matter how desperate or broken, was created to bear God’s image. It’s hard to view them that way when we only see them through the issues that they are facing, rather than seeing them as who they were created to be.

We are committed to partnering with community leaders and organizations, for long-term investment in order to see communities flourishing with people who are in a right relationship with God, self, others and creation. We want to be a church that’s building sustainable communities all over our city.

At Image Church we often say thatthe church isn’t an audience, it’s an army to be mobilized for the Kingdom. We want to respond to the gospel by mobilizing together in order to seek restoration and to see our city flourish.